A very exciting technology that Microsoft calls “Microsoft Surface” was unveiled at the All Things Digital conference by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer. It’s a “coffee table” that not only is a multi touch interface but it can also recognize what’s kept on it.

Although multi-touch interfaces like the ones that Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel has been developing for years or the iPhone interface have been around now, what sets the “Microsoft Surface” apart is its unique ability to recognize objects like cell phones, cameras or even a beer glasses that are kept on top of it. Not only recognizing but knowing what to do with it!

If you thought new Apple iPhone was cool, this is going to blow your mind! It may essentially revolutionize the way we interact with computers in the future.

The product is currently being targeted at Restaurants, Hotels, Retail Locations and Casino Resorts, so we’d not be able to get our hands on one just yet. But eventually the prices would come down we’d have one at every household. In Sri Lanka we’re still working on getting electricity to every home. So it may take a while.

I was just checking the DNS report for Kavinda.Net today and noticed I had not set my SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records!

This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from my domain. If you are receiving delivery failure notices for a message that you didn't send, it's likely that someone is already 'spoofing' your domain name.

By adding a SPF record in our DNS entries, we can provide a way for the recipients mail servers to check against these records to ensure that our email is coming to them from a server which is actually permitted to send email on behalf of our domain. This will help to stop forged emails and thus decrease spam, as almost always forged email addresses send us spam!

For those of you who are using Google Apps, here is what you need to add.

It looks like Sri Lanka Telecom has decided to provide its ADSL service to the residents of the Kadawatha area from the 10th of February 2007.

How do I know this? The www.slt.lk site provides a form where you could submit a phone number and find out if the ADSL service is available for that number.

Today I got this this when I submitted my home number:

Finally, I can stop emailing SLT asking for ADSL for my home!

If you have a ClickOnce application that is deployed in several environments, for example a staging environment and a production environment, you would have come across the fact that you can't simply install the application on a client PC from both environments even though you try to install from different URL's.

This can be overcome by using different certificates to sign the manifest files of each environment and by using a different name so that you'd get a different menu item for each environment. You'd have a "production.pfx" and a "staging.pfx" to sign the manifests of the production and staging environments respectively. By doing this now you can have side-by-side installations of the ClickOnce applications for each of your environments.

If you build your applications using visual studio itself, then changing the signing certificate file and name is one of the things you'd have to do before each build. But what if you've got a automated build environment, how do you do it then?

One way is to use the Manifest Generation and Editing (Mage.exe) command line tool to manually deploy the ClickOnce applications. If NAnt is what use Neil's blog post on ClickOnce deployment using NAnt should get you started.

If you're using CruiseControl.NET for your builds and you could do all this from the MsBuild task and pass in all the necessary changes for each environment as buildArgs. In this case we need to change the ManifestKeyFile and the ManifestCertificateThumbprint (This is the certificate thumbprint, in Visual Studio you can see this by clicking on the "more details" button on the "Signing" tab on the "Properties" page of your project)

Example of a CCNet MsBuild Task block where we change these values:

<!--Staging-->

<msbuild>
<executable>C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\MSBuild.exe</executable>
<workingDirectory>C:\MyClickOnce\</workingDirectory>
<projectFile>MyClickOnce.csproj</projectFile>
<buildArgs>/p:Configuration=Release
/p:InstallUrl=https://www.staging.url/
/p:PublisherName="Staging App"
/p:ManifestKeyFile="Staging.pfx"
/p:ManifestCertificateThumbprint="9DAAADE32307C99743FC74A475D6008370C65642"
</buildArgs>
<targets>Build;Publish</targets>
<timeout>15</timeout>
</msbuild>

Then you'd have another MsBuild task block to create the Production application.

I hope this helps someone, or points to some direction of a way of achieving a side-by-side ClickOnce installations of multiple environments.

Guys at the University of Central Florida are on the verge of fine-tuning a technology that could possibly store a capacity of at least 1,000 GB and high-definition quality onto a single disc or, perhaps, a small cube! Technology has improved quite a bit when you think that in 1956 it took equipment the size of a fridge to store 5MB of data.

[Read more on the Two-Photon 3-D Optical Data Storage system]

Know what this is?

Its one of the first magnetic hard disks made, this IBM 350 disk storage unit was able to store 5 megabytes of data and was a major part of the IBM 305 RAMAC, an electronic general purpose data processing machine system that was launched in 1956.

The 305 RAMAC was one of the last vacuum tube systems designed by IBM.
More than 1,000 of them were built before production ended in 1961 [more]

What a contrast to nowadays where we carry gigabytes of data in our USB flash drives while still complaining that they are either too large or don't store enough data!

More interesting photos at the IBM Storage Photo Album.

Does your active directory user account belong to too many groups?  What I mean by “too many groups” here varies, but the limit is approximately 120 groups if you’re on Windows 2000 (SP2) or Windows Server 2003 and even less if you’re still on Windows 2000 (original released version).

Why you belong to that many groups is another question, but in-case you do belong to that many groups and also are seeing symptoms like

– Group policy not being applied
– Validated to use network resources fails
– IIS configured for Windows authentication fails

You could be suffering from "Token Bloat!" Read more at Mark Minasi’s Windows Networking Tech Page October 2006

Check out the "IDEAS Stock Exchange!".

Rite-Solutions use a mock stock market called “Mutual Fun” for coming up with ideas and also to get a better idea of where company should be heading.

Basically its like a stock exchange, but the stock in this case is an idea. Employees can propose ideas, any idea.. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Other employees buy or sell these stocks depending on what they think about the idea, the prices change to reflect the sentiments of everybody in the company, everybody meaning even the receptionist.

Now isn't that just a brilliant idea?! Here is the full story

BTA is hiring! 

Associate Engineer – Systems Engineering
Engineer – Systems Engineering
QA Engineer – Systems Engineering
Program Manager – Systems Engineering

 Merill has more details

Well guys it looks like the part about “Can the sweeping powers of a VISA officer decide the future of Sri Lankan scientific programs?” on the post MURALI: Robot for landmine detection was actually true and in fact has happened to Dr. Thrishantha.

How do I know? Well, on the 2nd of May I received a short email from the Doctor himself. ( Yes, I did go through ALL the email headers to find out where the email came from!)

Here is the email (published with permission):